Humidity Control

[CloudtheBoa]

Spraying and misting will create wild fluctuations in humidity levels, because they're not actually raising the humidity. They may coat everything in a little bit of moisture, and the humidity reading will be higher while it's spraying, but it's not actually putting moisture into the air. As soon as you or the machine stops spraying, all the moisture will settle onto something.

The best way to raise humidity is reduce ventilation and increase volume and surface area of moisture evaporation. You want to cover, or replace, the screen with a non-porous material, such as Saran wrap, aluminum foil, or plexiglass. Then, you want to replace the bedding with high humidity beddings. Cypress mulch is about worthless for humidity in my experience, because when it dries out, it actually repels water. You want a bedding like coco coir, coco chips, or sphagnum moss. Cypress mulch and peat moss are also unrenewable resources, and their use should be avoided, especially when being used for mulching. Snake bedding makes little impact on the clearing of cypress forests, but many people do buy those big bags of no float mulching cypress, and thus still create demand. Those forests cannot currently replenish at all, and have a very important ecological function for the US and potentially worldwide. Peat moss has similar problems, but the easier to grow sphagnum does not. I believe you can even grow the moss in captivity!

Once you change the bedding, your humidity habits may have to change, depending on if those modifications alone were enough or not. I use EcoEarth, and I just pour water directly into the bedding instead of wasting time with a sprayer or mister. Then I mix it up to evenly spread the moisture. My big 6' cages can take up to 10+ gallons, my T12's usually only use maybe a gallon, and my tubs use a few cups of water. As the water evaporates out of the bedding, it provides all of your humidity without further work beyond re-wetting the bedding when it dries out again. I only need to do this maybe once every 1-2 weeks.

If you have problems with mold this way, it's because the bedding isn't being heated enough to evaporate the moisture quick enough. Adding more ventilation, or using an ambient heater should help here. I normally only have mold problems in my tub set ups with flexwatt, I have yet to have those same problems with CHEs or RHPs. Adding a chip-like bedding to EcoEarth may also help.

If you use sphagnum moss, what I would do is dip the moss into the water, squeeze in as much moisture as possible, then lift it back out of the water and squeeze the excess out before putting it back into the enclosure. Repeat as needed.